Musings

Today as I awakened, I had been dreaming of standing in the center of a night-time garden, looking at a vault of luminescent stars above while the scents of flowers surrounded me. I didn't want to wake up. I wanted to turn 'round and 'round, getting dizzy with the awe of the beauty of the night sky. It is a sight that I have only seen a few times in my life. Where humans go, light follows, and light is the enemy of the nighttime sky. Without a doubt there is something wonderful about cresting a hill and looking upon a sea of colorful lights below where the city lies. The nightime views of Los Angeles that have been imprinted on generations of movie and television viewers are wonderful - the gridlines of white and red lights that appear on the freeways, the pools of vertical lights where the skyscrapers thrust high. I grew up with a similar vision when we would pull away from the western Rocky Mountains to enter the Denver area. It always took my breath away. But man has nothing on the stars.

So, in this time when Stephen Hawking is seriously ill, I will celebrate the stars. I am always amazed that there are so many of them. Millions, billions, trillions, and more. And how often can we really see them in all of their glory? So rarely that we have shut ourselves off from them and forgotten their glory. We have hidden away from the night in fear and have tinged it with the touch of evil. It is not the night that is dangerous and filled with evil. It is that we are creatures of the light. I adore the light and need the sun to be happy. But I forgot that the night also has its' charms - that I can look up and see the most tremendous lights of creation above me in wide swaths across the sky. I hope that someday, before I die and go to dance with the stars myself, that I can find at least one time when I am in a locale without light pollution and with a cloudless sky where I can just lay back and immerse myself in their song. Can you hear it?....